The Moral and Political Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma
Beth Fowkes Tobin, University of Hawaii
Volume 2, no. 3, April 1990
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
This essay explores the ideological implications of landownership in Emma by focusing on Jane Austen’s depiction of Mr Knightley as an exemplary gentleman and landlord, and Emma as a less than exemplary member of the wealthy but landless gentry. I will argue that in linking Mr Knightley’s gentlemanly virtues with his owning land, and Emma’s moral inadequacies with her money and her lack of property, Austen, acting as an apologist for the landed classes, was defending the “paternal system of government'” from attacks stimulated by the new discourse on political economy, attacks that challenged the hereditary right of the gentry and aristocracy to the exclusive monopoly of the land.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Austen” include:
Why the Show Must Not Go On: ‘Real Character’ and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park
by KATHLEEN E. URDA (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
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